


and i still remember where i was when the feeling changed

by getmean



Series: last of us au [1]
Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Affection, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Injuries, The Last of Us AU, Yearning..., trying to think of a way to communicate a burgeoning relationship in a tag-friendly way but can't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-02-22 23:29:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23602108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: All around them, the city glitters in the late afternoon sun; blood-red and hanging low and fat in the sky. Down here close to the ground it’s hot, the pavements shimmering with it, stinking like standing water and crushed foliage and blooming late summer flowers. Hot orange poppies spring up between the cracked concrete, thick roping vines of ivy clawing hungrily at the crumbling sides of buildings. If Snafu wasn’t so intent on getting to high ground, maybe he’d be able to give pause to how beautiful it is. The peacefulness of this world can sometimes be so surprising.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Series: last of us au [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1735681
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	and i still remember where i was when the feeling changed

**Author's Note:**

> this is a commission for spreadyourwings-my-smiling-angel over on tumblr :~) thank you so much for commissioning me, this was such a fun prompt (despite the fact that i've never played the game haha!) hope you enjoy!

They make it a mile from where they were attacked before Snafu realises that Eugene is limping. 

It’s a slow realisation. His blood is still up and adrenaline is making his ears ring, all of his senses narrowed to do the bare minimum and nothing else. Snafu sees the road ahead, feels the soupy, thick air on his face, the sweat dripping down his back. Ears pricked like a dog. He hates travelling through cities; it makes his preoccupation with their surroundings all the more intense. Every cracked, mirrored window they pass makes him jump; makes him whirl around to confront the figure he spots from the corner of his eye, only to meet his own dirty, hollow-eyed reflection. 

Eugene is trailing along behind him, but he’s always been the follower to Snafu’s lead. It’s not that strange. And he’s quiet, which is a little out of the ordinary, but he had just had his face pressed into the dirty, heaved-up pavement slabs of what had once-upon-a-time been a public park, so Snafu can forgive a little silence. 

All around them, the city glitters in the late afternoon sun; blood-red and hanging low and fat in the sky. Down here close to the ground it’s hot, the pavements shimmering with it, stinking like standing water and crushed foliage and blooming late summer flowers. Hot orange poppies spring up between the cracked concrete, thick roping vines of ivy clawing hungrily at the crumbling sides of buildings. If Snafu wasn’t so intent on getting to high ground, maybe he’d be able to give pause to how beautiful it is. The peacefulness of this world can sometimes be so surprising. 

His side is aching from the blow the guys they’d ran into managed to land on him. His head had rung when they’d tackled him to the ground; cracking hard enough off the concrete that for a second his vision had gone all grey and fuzzed out around the edges. But then Eugene had cried out, and —

Snafu touches the back of his head. Probing gently at the sticky patch of hair at the curve of his skull until it hurts too much, and he has to drop it. Up ahead, a rusted school bus sits sunk to its knees in a wide pool of mossy green water, the roof of it serving as an almost-perfect ramp up to a second-storey balcony. A lightbulb pops in Snafu’s head at the sight of it.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea —” Snafu begins, throwing a glance over his shoulder and cutting himself off abruptly at the sight he’s met with. Eugene, face ashen and sweaty, struggling visibly beneath the modest weight of his pack. “Eugene,” Snafu says, surprised at the dart of alarm that goes through him as he doubles back to Eugene’s side. “What’s wrong?”

They don’t stop walking; both of them know well enough by now that pausing out in the open is a fool’s game. It’s how Snafu notices Eugene’s limp; the deliberate favouring of his right leg over his left. His heart sinks into his stomach.

“I’m fine,” Eugene mutters, as stubborn as ever. Snafu makes a frustrated noise, but offers Eugene his arm to lean on anyway. They don’t have time to argue; it’s more important than ever now to find some shelter, so he can take a real look at Eugene’s leg. 

They’re still so many hundreds of miles from their goal that Snafu can’t even think about it. Instead he hauls Eugene into the cover of a nearby shop; some abandoned and completely looted bodega with cardboard taped over the windows. The idea of the second-storey room a handful of yards away is abandoned; Snafu knows he’d be hard-pressed to get Eugene up onto the roof of the bus in this state. 

The air inside the bodega is stale and warm and choked with hundreds of tiny buzzing flies, erupting up from the green pools of water as Snafu steps as silently as he can through them. He’d left Eugene outside, leaning up against the front of the shop as he caught his breath. Face still grey, clammy when Snafu had touched his forehead, though that could be the fear just as well as it could be pain. No way to know until Snafu gets a look at him, but the not-knowing nags at him. Even now, while he’s supposed to be making sure the shop is clear, Snafu finds he can’t drag his mind from his worry for Eugene. 

He glances down one wrecked aisle, the shelves tipped over and almost completely cleared. The shop stinks like spoiled milk and standing water; that swamp smell that reminds Snafu so unpleasantly of home. Makes sense he’d find a fragment of it here; bastardised, twisted, coiled up in curdled milk and pit-of-the-stomach fear for a man who had been nothing but a paycheck two weeks ago.

He thinks of Spanish moss, drifting lazily in the mist that always settled low on the bayou on cold mornings. The smell of his mother’s bedroom, like patchouli and smoke and perfume. Sometimes, if Snafu tries hard enough, he can smell it like he’s back there again. 

A noise tugs him up and out of the memory like a fish on a hook. Snafu’s hand shifts on the stock of his pistol, sweat springing up on his forehead as he creeps slowly through the hot, dim interior of the bodega, eyes probing at the shadows for another person besides him and Eugene. The door to the backroom is hanging off its hinges, splintered as though someone had kicked it in. Snafu passes soundlessly through, pokes at a couple empty pallets leaning against the walls in there, and then deems it safe.

“Jesus,” Eugene says, when Snafu motions him inside. “It stinks.”

“’S safe,” Snafu mutters, leading Eugene through to the back, where a single bare lightbulb illuminates the stained concrete floor. Racks line the walls; Snafu catches the tail of a rat disappearing as he coaxes Eugene down onto a pallet. “C’mon, lemme see.”

“It’s not serious,” Eugene insists, shifting his pack from his back before bending to roll the bottom of his pants up. “I think it’s twisted.”

Snafu probes at the swollen skin he can see above the top of Eugene’s boot, his worry ebbing and flowing in his chest as he decides whether to give into it or not. He shouldn’t. Worry isn’t useful, isn’t ever an emotion to harness. But the way Eugene winces as Snafu begins tugging at the laces on his boots still has the feeling rearing its head in his chest, and there’s little he can do to press it down. When the fuck did he start being helpless to _worry_? That’s what he should be concerned about. His fucking cash prize for delivering Eugene safely is what he should be worrying about, as he loosens the shoe enough to pull it away, and Eugene has to stick his fingers in his mouth to muffle his pain.

“You should’ve left the boot on,” he breathes, face in shadow, ducked against the dim circle of light the bulb throws. Snafu just grunts at him. 

“You think I don’t know that?” He tugs Eugene’s sock down to inspect his rapidly purpling ankle. “Checking to see if it’s broken is more important.”

Eugene is silent as Snafu checks him over, just the sounds of their breathing, the occasional wince from him when Snafu probes too hard. The building shifts in the heat, as sweaty and footsore as them. Snafu sits back, and drags his rucksack closer to reach his medical kit at the bottom.

“Not broken,” he says. The atmosphere shifts with Eugene’s clear relief. “But we’ve gotta get you off it, at least overnight,” Snafu adds, tearing the paper wrapper from around the roll of bandages he has, letting it unfurl into his lap. “We’ll stay here tonight.”

“Are you sure?” 

Snafu can hear the unease in Eugene’s voice. He shrugs, bending back over Eugene’s ankle to begin wrapping it as tightly as he can. “I don’t like it any more than you do.” It surprises him how little annoyance he feels about the situation. No, just that worry, moving like the tide inside him.

Snafu knows that he’ll have to stay up to keep watch tonight. Something about a ground floor room with no backdoor makes him uneasy; Snafu isn’t sure he’d sleep well even if he could. Especially when the gang of men who’d ambushed them earlier are only a stone’s throw from where they’re hiding. Snafu sighs. 

“I’m sorry,” Eugene offers. Snafu waves him off. 

“Just glad you ain’t too banged up,” he murmurs, gruffly, and surprises himself by how much he means that. 

The bodega offers little up in the way of foraging — if it can even be called that. Snafu unearths a smashed packet of Twinkies in his quest for anything canned, and shows it to Eugene, who has hobbled out to watch. Eugene grabs at the packet from his perch on one of the fridges, muttering, “Score,” as Snafu surrenders it to him.

“That’s disgustin’,” he mutters, watching Eugene tear into one, and turns away to hide his smile at the wink Eugene throws him in reply. Goddamn, what’s that all about? Something’s been growing hollow little wings in his chest for two weeks now, but recently Snafu’s been feeling it begin to flex them.

The freezers are empty and stale-smelling, old electricity and long-melted ice. A single roach flexes its legs sluggishly, marooned upside-down at the bottom of one. Snafu slides the top closed, and goes to investigate the cash register. 

“You worried?” Eugene asks, as Snafu skirts the edge of one of the standing pools of rainwater, peering up at the ceiling as he does so. There’s a hole in it; several holes, he realises, all letting in a beam of dusty sunlight to pool on the floor, on the greasy surfaces of the puddles that have settled in the warped linoleum. 

“No,” he replies, absently, head craned to catch the glimpse of orange sky through the holes. “You’ll be fine, nobody’s ever died from a twisted ankle, Gene.”

There’s a beat of silence. Snafu hits the top of the cash register, and the thing opens with a slam. Nothing inside but a lone dime that Snafu pockets.

“No, I don’t mean about me,” Eugene murmurs, and Snafu glances at him, confused. “The money. Are you worried about not gettin’ all the money?” 

Snafu blinks at him, and then looks away, back to the empty cash drawer like it holds the secrets to the universe. “I ain’t worried ‘bout that,” he manages, frowning at where his mind had jumped to first. 

Eugene hums, and when Snafu sneaks a glance his way he’s examining a print-out on the wall, the warm light picking up the grease on fingers from the Twinkies. He thinks of the alarm that had ripped through him at the sight of Eugene’s pained expression, the half-resigned dread that he’d felt when Eugene had been wincing at him pulling his boot off. Shit, Snafu had been so sure he’d find a broken ankle under it. He hadn’t given thought to the money even once.

The space behind the register turns up a pack of smokes probably as old as Eugene himself, which Snafu takes as a reward for getting his head rung off the sidewalk. Eugene cleans up the gash it had left him while Snafu smokes, sat on the ground with Eugene kneeled behind him, nostrils full of the smell of iodine as Eugene dabs gently at the back of his head. 

“You ever been up north?” Eugene asks him, a soft murmur from behind. 

Snafu takes a drag from his stale cigarette before he replies, eyes on the cracked concrete between his feet. “Never been further north than Arkansas.” 

“Excited to go to Massachusetts?” Eugene asks, and Snafu snorts.

“Dunno if excited is the right word.” He’s silent for a minute, while Eugene finishes up cleaning his head wound. Snafu catches sight of the bloodied pads of gauze when he turns to watch Eugene pack the first aid kit away, and wrinkles his nose as he remembers the smear of blood he’d left on the sidewalk. He can still feel the man’s arms around his waist, hot stinking breath in his face as he’d slammed Snafu down. It was ironic to think that all those guys were after was their meagre supply of food, the few cases of bullets at the bottom of Snafu’s pack. Ironic that the real valuable thing was the person they were beating on. 

Snafu flicks his eyes up to Eugene’s face, away from the scuffed knuckles and palms of his hands. There’s a black eye blooming there, darkening the socket, the top of his cheekbone. It’d fade before Massachusetts. Time is all that most things need. Snafu hopes whatever is stretching its wings in his chest will settle by then too. 

Eugene had told Snafu the reasons for this trip four nights ago. His immunity. The fresh pink scar of a bite wound at the junction of neck and shoulder. Maybe it’s that, which is making Snafu see him differently. 

They make beans on the camp stove, the hissing noise of the flame and the bubbling of the pot the only noises as night begins to descend. Snafu watches the sky through the largest hole in the ceiling, smoking a cigarette instead of eating anything, watching as it goes from orange to a vague purple, to deep navy blue. 

Eugene won’t eat Snafu’s portion of dinner for love nor money, so Snafu surrenders to it in the end. Eats it down lukewarm and disgusting, grumbling the whole time.

“You need to keep your strength up,” he admonishes, scraping at the bottom of the pan. “Heal that damn ankle.” 

“Like you haven’t got a _head wound_ ,” Eugene bites back, to which Snafu rolls his eyes. His head is aching, sure, but it’s not gonna affect him putting one foot in front of the other. 

He’s not sleeping tonight anyway, as precaution. He’s not about to die in his sleep from a concussion with all that money on the line. _And leave Gene out here alone to fend for himself_ , a sly internal voice reminds him, and Snafu draws himself up from the ground to go wipe out the inside of the pot before that thought can settle. No fending about it; he wouldn’t have time to fend before some calamity would befall him. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe Eugene’s grown up in this world, the lack of survival skills he seems to possess. 

“My head wound’s no fuckin’ worry,” he mutters, scooping up the stove with a little more force than necessary as he begins to put it back together. “Looks worse than it is.”

“And my ankle?”

Snafu kisses his teeth. “Looks worse than it is.”

Eugene looks set to argue something else then, face shadowed in the dark but a frown visibly crossing it, before a shout from outside makes them both freeze. As one, their heads turn towards the front of the shop, and then Eugene jumps at the sound of a gunshot. Snafu doesn’t react, but his heart is pounding in his ears as he slowly and silently crosses the room to tap Eugene on the shoulder.

“Into the back,” he breathes, and the strip of moonlight from the broken ceiling shows that Eugene’s gone pale, his eyes panicked. Snafu nudges at him, just as he flinches back behind the cover of one of the tipped-over shelves as another gunshot splits the air, and from outside someone yells, _stop!_ “Gene, move,” Snafu hisses, because the windows may be boarded over but the door isn’t, and outside the moonlight is picking up vaguely human shapes behind the scratched, cloudy perspex. “Keep low.”

Wistfully, Snafu thinks of the second-floor of the building down the street. Probably someone’s abandoned house; probably would’ve had a stained old sofa for Eugene to sleep on and maybe even a carpeted floor for Snafu. A gas stove that might’ve worked. Most importantly, twenty feet of vertical space between them and whatever poor bastard is out there not a few feet from the shop’s front door. 

They skulk into the back room, soundless apart from their breathing, apart from Eugene’s very faint whine of pain as he fetches up against the wall and slides to the floor. 

“Prop your fuckin’ foot up,” Snafu tells him, harsher than he’d meant to be, but adrenaline is slamming his heart up against his ribcage and he doesn’t have time to soften his voice. All he can see in the darkness is the whites of Eugene’s eyes, the flash of moonlight off the ring on his finger as he leans to lift the pallet closer to himself as a makeshift foot-stool. 

Snafu, back to the wall and cheek pressed to the corner of the doorway, locks his eyes on the front of the shop. Dim, shadowed, the knocked-over shelves and quiet fridges shapeless lumps in the darkness. His hand’s so tight around his gun it’s starting to feel numb. 

“It’s gone quiet,” Eugene breathes.

Snafu hisses, “Shut up,” and strains his eyes for any trace of those figures. Maybe the same ones who’d jumped him and Eugene earlier. He’s sure the only reason they’d gotten away mostly in one piece was for the fact that those guys were just as surprised to see them as Snafu was. Them, or something far worse. “We should’ve gone further,” Snafu mutters, and both of them fall silent and still to listen to a sudden volley of distant shouting.

A gunshot cracks the night. Then another, and another, before everything falls quiet once more. 

Eugene’s panicked breathing fills the space the gunshots had left. Snafu waits for sixty beats of his heart, frozen so still that his muscles ache with it. When Eugene speaks, Snafu jumps, so shocked at hearing a voice come from nearby that he doesn’t immediately register it as words.

“What?”

“I said I don’t wanna do this anymore,” Eugene repeats, and his voice is small, so quiet that Snafu has to lean in close just to hear him. He’s pressed tight to the wall, one leg to his chest, the other still dutifully propped up on the pallet. “Every single night — I just want things back to normal.”

 _What the fuck could normal look like to you?_ Snafu wants to ask, kneeled close to Eugene’s side. He doesn’t know what to say instead. _This is the way life is now. This is the way it will stay unless we get you where you need to go._ When Eugene finally looks at Snafu, his eyes flash wide and afraid through the dark.. 

“You’re older than me,” he murmurs. “Do you remember what it was like before this all happened?” His breath is still catching in his throat, making his speech jerky, his voice thin. 

Snafu glances away. “A little. I was young.”

Footsteps in the street outside. They freeze; leaned in so close to each other that Snafu can hear Eugene swallow. So close he can smell Eugene’s skin, can smell the sweat on him from the heat of the day, from the humidity of the close room they’re stuck in. His eyes have slipped shut. Snafu’s chest is aching, torn between keeping an eye on the door and trying to calm Eugene’s fraying nerves. He’s never been good at this sort of thing.

“I’d never left Louisiana,” he mutters, voice low. To his surprise, Eugene finds his wrist with one fear-clammy hand, and grasps hold of it. Snafu takes it as his cue to keep talking, and so he does, eyes fixed on what he can see of Eugene’s face as everything else slips away. “Not before this. Lived my whole childhood in a little town on the banks of the bayou.”

“Is it still there?” Eugene breathes. 

“I guess it must be.” Snafu drops his free hand to circle over Eugene’s, unsticking his fingers from around his wrist until he can hold his hand properly, until he can squeeze it. “Haven’t been back in a good fifteen years.” He glances away. “Rememberin’ it is hard.”

Eugene’s fingers twitch in his grip. “Tell me your favourite memory,” he says, voice sounding more even that it had a minute ago. Snafu swallows.

Spanish moss. Nag Champa. The rolling mist on the swamp. He hates remembering that this world is the same one that had held all that. Likes to keep it locked up tight in the memory box in his head, safe where the world can’t touch it, but Eugene’s gaze is beseeching and Snafu’s chest is expanding around that little flapping thing in there, and he’s speaking before he realises it.

“My momma had this jewellery box,” he murmurs, the memory slipping from his mouth without him needing to choose it. “It was this real nice tortoiseshell thing, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl and lined with red velvet. Sorta thing you saw on TV. Sorta thing the queen would have.”

“Which queen?” Eugene asks, and Snafu snorts, leans his shoulder up against Eugene’s.

“Any, whatever. _A_ queen.” They laugh, quietly. Snafu shifts so he can sit against the wall like Eugene, shifts their entwined hands to his lap. “I loved that thing. It smelled — it smelled like her perfume and like real rich varnish, and kinda metallic from everything in there. I used to sneak into her room while she was out workin’ nights, and I’d drag this footstool over to her dresser so I can reach it down. Just liked to sit on the floor with it and open it up, look through everythin’ in there. Used to wish my parents pierced my ears when I was a baby, like they did to my little cousin.”

Eugene rests his head on Snafu’s shoulder. “What was your favourite piece?” His breathing has calmed; voice sounding less reedy and afraid. Gently, Snafu releases his hand. The combination of the crown of Eugene’s head against Snafu’s cheek and the sweaty clutch of their hands is making his chest feel tight.

“I had a couple favourites,” he murmurs, and if he closes his eyes Snafu can see them plain as day. As if he was five years old and staring into that box of treasure again. “She had this huge turquoise ring, big enough to knock you out.” He pauses, remembers the weight of it in his hands, the way the sunlight would fall in stripes through the blinds into his mom’s bedroom. “Never saw her wear it, but I wanted it. And this gold pair of earrings shaped like tears.” Fat, golden things, winking slickly in the late afternoon sunlight. He can still hear the distinctive clicking noise the box made when it closed, the catch of some internal latch.

When Snafu opens his eyes, it’s to darkness, it’s to moonlight illuminating a strip of mottled, stained concrete. The smell of standing water and spoiled milk in his nose. Eugene’s hair, Eugene’s sweat. 

It hurts, to remember, when this is the place to surface to.

“How’s your ankle?” he asks, tiredly, hoping it might signal the end to this particular trip down memory lane. Eugene is so warm against his side that it’s making him sleepy, though maybe that’s the head wound talking.

“Hurts,” Eugene mutters. And then, “Would you ever go back?”

Snafu grunts. “No.”

“You ain’t got anyone waitin’ on you?”

Snafu moves to dig his cigarettes from the pocket of his pants, and lights one up. His hands feel jittery from the sudden adrenaline crash he’s experiencing, and that, coupled with the past rearing up and Eugene’s closeness, has him needing a smoke. He waits until he sucks a good lungful in before he replies, “No.” He doesn’t want to have to tell Eugene he’s pushing it. Two weeks in nothing but each other’s company should have given him a good idea of Snafu’s boiling point. 

He seems to settle. The night is quiet once more, and Snafu finds himself drifting, cradled between his exhaustion and the warm presence of Eugene at his side. His adrenaline has ebbed entirely, and has left him feeling hollow, and melancholy, exhausted down to his bones. In the last few years he’s been able to quietly master the skill of being able to fall asleep anywhere; it’s coming into play now, no matter how hard he tries to rail against it. For a while, he dozes, dreams of gold winking in the sunlight. Even the first couple years after the sickness had broken out, things had been close to normal. The world still turned, the grass still grew. His momma still baked bread on Sundays and made him say his prayers before bedtime. 

“Was it peaceful?” Eugene whispers, and Snafu’s just on that ledge before sleep that he hears him. 

“Was what peaceful?” he slurs, sliding his arm unthinkingly over Eugene’s shoulders. They come together, melt together, stinking and bruised. Eugene tucks his face down against Snafu’s shoulder, who rests his cheek on Eugene’s head. 

“The world.” 

Snafu snorts, nosing into Eugene’s hair. The creature in his chest is purring; he’ll be embarrassed for this in the morning. “Sometimes,” he murmurs. “But so is this one.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
